Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin

Posted by fnthawar2 22 hours ago

Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin(shopify.engineering)

1108 points | 800 commentspage 5

aecorredor 21 hours ago|

The most interesting part to me here was the whole helix thing + how they split business logic and UI just so AI agents could drive/test state via a CLI. I hope they do a deeper blog post on just that. I’m surprised they are making “decouple state from UI” sound like something groundbreaking when that’s kind of been the foundation for any sane/testable app for a LONG time.

koeliga 21 hours ago||

https://shopify.engineering/shop-app-migration

follow up with some more technical details and benchmarks

rietta 21 hours ago||

The promise of React Native was easing development burden from the web app to the native app. It makes sense if they are just using coding agents to cut out the framework and just go native.

That was my thought when I saw the headline and then reading the article confirms this is the inflection point per their own words. Very interesting.

socalgal2 11 hours ago||

I agree with this but not just React, React-Native. There's many libraries I no longer have a need for. I've made several JS 3d apps just asking the LLM to write the 3D code from scratch. AFAICT they usually shed 2meg of library and run 1.5x to 3x faster as the LLM will do the optimal thing for the situation.

petegleeson 13 hours ago||

Surely the decision comes down to whether they have the expertise to build native apps.

I know JS and I know models still write a lot of garbage JS. I don’t know Swift so a model writing Swift all LTGM. Garbage is still there, I just can’t see it.

The solve isn’t another agentic harness. I need to learn more.

Lots of faster/cheaper justifications. I believe that part. If the quality bar is “web devs prompt models” then that’s a worry.

vmg12 19 hours ago||

React native isn't a terrible idea, its fundamental issue is that Apple does not allow for JIT compilation on iOS. So that means your app's js logic will be an order of magnitude slower than what you would get in the browser.

fergie 6 hours ago||

In the age of LLMs, I get why you would dump portablity in favour of close-to-the-metal Swift and Javascript codebases. However I don't really understand the need for Kotlin- surely thats just an unnecessary complication and performance hit?

sgt 6 hours ago||

That's for the Android version, I would assume

fergie 6 hours ago||

Right- but why not let the LLM program directly in Java?

sgt 5 hours ago|||

Java can still be used but it's no longer the recommended choice for Android apps. For any new Android apps nowadays you start with Kotlin and Jetpack compose (made by Google).

In fact, I think Google's been saying this for 6-7 years already.

m11c 5 hours ago|||

Because Kotlin is the primary language for Android.

listenallyall 5 hours ago||

Kotlin compiles to the same JVM bytecode that Java itself does. There is no performance hit. And from a developer's perspective, no it is not a "complication", Kotlin is a much more pleasant and efficient language to program in than Java (in my opinion, and that of many others).

faceless3 3 hours ago||

And they still has zero job openings for Android/iOS devs

harrouet 5 hours ago||

The one topic that is almost not addressed in this post is: what happens to the React Native developer team?

Technologies are never the issue. The people is.

hn993302 9 hours ago|

Yep. First time I "wrote" a native iPhone or Mac app in about 9 years was recently. I've written plenty of C, C++, Rust, etc code but always found Swift and ObjC to be uniquely bad, and Apple's UI frameworks and tooling are terrible. So one way or another wanted it to mostly not be my problem. First that was RN's job, now it's Claude's job.

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